The Green Binder On The Kitchen Table

The smell before anything else

The binder came home with me in a canvas bag that used to hold my father's swimming things, and when I put it on the kitchen table and opened it the first thing that reached me was not the paper or the numbers. It was the glue. That old gum smell, slightly sweet, slightly sour, the smell of a stationery cupboard in a school that has not been redecorated since 1978. I teach geography. I have opened a lot of cupboards like that. But this glue was older and it had been drying in a green ring binder for four decades, layer on layer, and when the covers came apart it breathed out at me and I sat down hard on the kitchen chair.

He died in April, my father. A stroke, in the morning, in his chair, with the radio on. He was eighty. The nurse who came out told me it would have been quick and I have decided to believe her because the alternative is not something I can carry to work on a Monday.

I am fifty two. I am the executor. I did not ask for that job and I am not, by any measure, a finance person. I want to say that plainly at the start so that nobody reading this expects competence from me. I can tell you about oxbow lakes and longshore drift and the way a corrie forms on the shaded side of a mountain. I cannot tell you what a nominee account is. I had to look up the word custodian and I still am not confident I have it right.

Two hundred and eleven slips

The binder is A4, green, with a paper label on the spine in his capital letters. Inside there are sheets of plain paper, and on the sheets, gummed down flat and square, are the dividend slips. Hundreds of them. I counted two hundred and eleven in the first section alone before I lost my place and stopped. They go by date, oldest at the front, and the earliest ones are on that thin bluish paper that companies used to send, the kind that crackles.

He was a shipping clerk. Forty one years at the same desk, first with the ledgers and then, in the last stretch, with a computer he never really trusted. He bought shares the way other men bought raffle tickets, in small amounts, whenever there was a bit left over. Never anything large. Never anything clever. A few of this, a few of that, and a lot of it foreign, because he had spent his working life reading manifests full of foreign place names and I think the far away companies felt familiar to him in a way they never did to me.

And in the margins, everywhere, in blue biro, his notes.

Bought on the strength of the Rotterdam figures.

Cut the payout. Hold anyway.

Ask Bill about this one.

I never met Bill. I have no idea who Bill is. Bill may be dead. Bill may be sitting in a chair somewhere with the radio on, and my father is not there to ask him anything, and I found that I minded that quite a lot at eleven o'clock at night with a cold cup of tea beside me.

The numbers that would not sit still

I started with the idea that I would reconcile. That was my word for it, borrowed from somewhere, and I said it to my wife with the confidence of a man who does not know what he is doing. I would take the modern brokerage statements, which arrive as PDFs and are laid out like an airline schedule, and I would lay them next to the binder, and I would tick things off.

It did not work.

The share names matched. The dates more or less matched. But the amounts did not. Never. Not once, on the foreign holdings. He would have written in the margin, in that steady blue hand, a figure. And the statement would show something smaller. Not wildly smaller. Just less. Fifteen percent less on some. A quarter less on others. One Swiss thing where a great chunk of it seemed to simply evaporate somewhere between being declared and being paid.

And I sat there for the better part of a week and I thought: he was making mistakes.

I want to be honest about how that felt, because it was not neutral. It made me angry, and then it made me sad, and then it made me a little bit frightened. My father was not a careless man. He was the opposite of a careless man. He was the sort who wrote down the mileage every time he filled the car and kept the receipt for a kettle for eleven years. If he had started getting his sums wrong then that meant something had been going wrong in him, quietly, for a long time, and nobody noticed. Not my mother, who died first. Not me, who visited on Sundays and talked about the football.

I lay awake with that. I thought about a slow erosion, the sort of thing I draw on a whiteboard with arrows. I thought about how you can look at a cliff every day for twenty years and not see it go.

What was actually happening

It was my brother in law, who works in insurance and therefore counts as a wizard in our family, who said the obvious thing over a Sunday lunch while I was complaining into my potatoes.

He said: what were the gross amounts?

I said: the what?

He said: the number your dad wrote down. Was it what the company declared, or what turned up in his account?

And I went home and I looked again and of course, of course, my father had been writing down what the company declared. He was reading the announcements. He was doing exactly what a careful man does, which is to record the fact as stated by the source. And then a smaller sum was arriving, because somewhere between the company in Zurich or Paris or wherever and my father's bank in a town where nothing happens, a slice had been taken off. Taken off abroad. Before it ever crossed a border. Before it ever became his.

I did not know this was a thing. I genuinely, fifty two years old, holder of a mortgage and a pension I do not understand, did not know that a foreign country could reach into a dividend and take a piece of it on the way past. When I started reading about it, late at night, in that state where you have thirty browser tabs open and none of them agree, I found that it has a name, and the name is dividend tax withholding, and that people have apparently been dealing with this for as long as there have been dividends and borders.

There is a whole architecture to it. Countries have arrangements between them, treaties, and the treaties are supposed to mean you do not get taxed twice on the same money, and there is a rate that is meant to apply and a rate that actually gets applied and these are frequently, from what I can gather, not the same number. I am not going to sit here and tell you what the percentages are, because I do not know, and every page I read had a different figure and a lot of caveats and I have already established that I am the sort of man who has to look up the word custodian.

What I can tell you is what it felt like. It felt like discovering that a river I had been drawing for years had a tributary I had never marked.

The one that stopped me

I went back to the binder differently after that. Not to reconcile. Just to read.

And somewhere in the section for the mid seventies, on a slip that had gone the colour of weak tea, there was a line in blue biro that said:

Bought this week. The boy arrived Tuesday. 8lb 4oz. Small stake, long hold, for him one day I expect.

I was born on a Tuesday. I have been told that my whole life. Tuesday's child.

He never told me. Forty something years and he never once said, I bought a bit of something the week you were born and I have kept it. It is still there, it turns out. It is on the modern statement, sitting near the bottom, a small line item, and every year it has paid a little and every year a bit of that little has been taken off somewhere in Europe before it reached him, and he wrote both numbers down anyway, because that is who he was.

I have thought a great deal about why he did not tell me. I think the honest answer is that he was not a man who said things like that out loud. He said them in blue biro on the back of a dividend slip and he gummed it into a binder and he put the binder in the sideboard, and if I had never had to be the executor I would never have known, and the whole thing would have gone to a house clearance in a canvas bag.

Trying to sort it out, badly

I have been trying, since then, to work out what if anything can be done about the missing slices. Whether they are simply gone, absorbed into some foreign exchequer, or whether some of it was never supposed to have been taken in the first place. That distinction, between what is properly owed and what has been over collected because a form was not filed or a residence was not proved, seems to be the entire heart of the thing, and I have found it maddeningly hard to get a straight answer on.

I have sat on hold. I have been transferred. I have had a very polite young man explain the mechanics of dividend withholding to me in a voice that suggested he was reading from a screen he could not see properly either. I have downloaded forms in languages I cannot read and put them in a folder called ADMIN which I already resent.

Some of it will be too old. There are time limits, apparently. Windows that close. My father held some of these for thirty years and I suspect the door on most of it shut a long time ago, quietly, while he was at his desk doing the manifests.

I do not think he would have minded very much. I think if I could ask him he would shrug and say that it was the cost of owning a bit of the world from a small house a long way from it. He was not a bitter man about money. He never expected anyone to make it easy.

The binder stays

I have not finished. There are sections I have not opened. There is a whole run from the eighties I have been putting off because his handwriting changes slightly around then, gets smaller and more upright, and I do not know what happened in his life to make that happen and I am not sure I want to find out on a weeknight.

The professional advice is that I should digitise it. Scan the lot, get it into a spreadsheet, deal with the dividend withholding tax question properly and systematically, and then dispose of the paper. It is the sensible thing. It is what I would tell a pupil to do.

I am not going to do it.

The binder is staying on the shelf in the back room, on the end, next to the atlases. Because the numbers are only half of what is in it. The other half is a man leaning over a kitchen table under a bad light with a biro, forty years of Tuesday evenings, writing down what he was told he would get and what he actually got and never once complaining to anyone about the difference. Recording it. Just recording it, carefully, in case it mattered to someone one day.

It did. It does.

Last night I opened it at random and the glue smell came up again, that cupboard smell, and I sat with it for a while. There is a slip near the back with nothing written on it at all, no note, no margin, just the printed figures and his date stamp in the corner. And underneath, faintly, where the pen had run dry and he had scribbled to get the ink going, three little loops.

I have no idea why that is the thing that finished me. But it is.